The San Diego Padres‘ dreams faded rather quickly this summer.
The offseason was an incredibly aggressive one for first-year general manager A.J. Preller, who brought in no fewer than seven new players to upgrade a team that had not finished higher than third place in the previous four seasons.
With those moves came gargantuan expectations within a division that already housed a club with three World Series titles in the past five years (the San Francisco Giants) and another with a record-breaking payroll (the Los Angeles Dodgers).
For a short time, the Padres lived up to the hype, winning 10 of their first 15 games. Then came a reality check in the form of seven losses in their next eight contests. They never realistically sniffed the top of the National League West again.
With that kind of letdown comes consequences, including a fired manager (Bud Black) and the expectation to sell at the trade deadlines, both in July and August. But even though the Padres were virtually silent in July and most of the subsequent month, they still have a valuable trade chip in starter James Shields.
He has already cleared waivers, meaning he can be traded to any team until the August 31 deadline. And the Padres would probably like to get rid of his contract before it gets too heavy for their payroll.
Shields cleared waivers because his four-year, $75 million contract turns huge next season.
The Padres are paying him $10 million this year, of which less than $2 million is left, and his salary dramatically jumps to $21 million in each of the next three campaigns with a $16 million team option for a fifth or a $2 million buyout in 2019. Shields can opt out after next season, but given the way the entirety of this year has gone, he’s unlikely to do so.
Understandably, no team was going to take a chance at claiming the 33-year-old right-hander and risk being stuck with him and that contract.
Despite the money, Shields has a certain appeal to teams pushing for playoff spots with dreams of World Series appearances floating in their heads.
Since July 1, Shields has taken the ball 10 times and produced a 2.95 ERA in 61 innings. Despite that, the Padres are 3-7 in those starts and currently sit 6.5 games out of first place in their division and 11.5 out of the second wild-card spot with four teams ahead of them.
All of this gives the Padres incentive to move the postseason-tested Shields, and it gives a contender something to think about heading into the final days of the August trade deadline.
The Padres are under no mandate to cut their franchise-record $108 million payroll, nor to trade Shields, but one option could be a swapping of hugely disappointing contracts. For example, the Padres could pursue a trade for Pablo Sandoval, whom they sought in free agency last offseason, from the Boston Red Sox along with another player or cash in exchange for Shields, a trade suggested by the Boston Globe‘s Nick Cafardo.
The Padres are unlikely to eat too much of Shields’ deal, so this kind of option might be their best bet to put him on his fourth team in four seasons.
“It makes too much sense, so it won’t happen,” a scout told Cafardo of the possibility earlier this month.
Some of the reasons Shields did not sign with the Padres until February undoubtedly included that he was at an advanced age and the mileage on his arm was already great, which kept teams away. Leading into this season, he had thrown over 200 innings in eight of the past nine years, and the only one in which he failed to do so was his rookie season, when he made only 21 starts for the Tampa Bay Rays.
Decline seemed inevitable, and no club wanted to flirt with the disastrous possibility that Shields would completely fall off a cliff without warning. And over his first 16 starts that certainly seemed to be the case as he compiled a 4.24 ERA and allowed 16 home runs despite making his new home in cavernous Petco Park, a stadium that in 2014 allowed among the fewest long balls in the majors.
However, he’s at 158.2 innings pitched with a 3.74 ERA—right in line with his career averages. He’s also at 9.9 strikeouts per nine innings (though his walk rate is dramatically up from 1.7 last year to 3.2), his highest mark yet.
A day before last month’s non-waiver deadline, Jeff Sanders of the San Diego Union-Tribune detailed Shields’ decline, ending his piece with this: “None of this is to say that Shields can’t be a productive pitcher moving forward. He clearly can, but the Padres might be out of luck if they were hoping to get someone else to pay him to be a $21 million pitcher over the next three years.”
That may still be true, and the Padres, if they want to move him, might have to eat some of that money. But things have changed since that examination of Shields’ fall. He’s gotten much better over the last two months.
And in a time of need, that might be enough for some contender to take the bait.
All quotes, unless otherwise specified, have been acquired firsthand by Anthony Witrado. Follow Anthony on Twitter @awitrado and talk baseball here.
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